Week Notes 5


Terence Eden speaking at a conference.

Short week! Monday was a bank holiday (mostly recovering from my mate Pete's wedding) and Friday was off to EMF Camp. But, I managed to get some work done! LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! And the accompanying blog post NHS Majority of my time spend on helping run a design sprint for improving some NHS processes with […]

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Enabling Voice-Over-WiFi on the OnePlus 5T and Three UK


VoWifi Logo on the top of the Android display.

My mobile provider - Three UK - offers WiFi calling, but only if you have a phone purchased directly from them. For everyone else, they have a crappy app which hasn't been updated in two years. So, let's break out of their artificial restrictions and get some WiFi calling on the OnePlus 5T! Step-by-step Open […]

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Weeknotes 4


Terence Eden speaking at a conference.

Welcome back! These are my brief thoughts on what I've been working on this week. Work Blogging! I've written two new blog posts for GDS. I love blogging - but I sometimes shy away from doing it for work. I naïvely think I write practically perfect prose - and then a team of brilliant editors […]

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Why Android Pie Won't Be Getting the Copyleft Symbol


Wikipedia Copyleft page. The icon is a blank box.

Google is a company with nearly unlimited resources. It often chooses to use its power for the greater good of the Internet. Creating amazing projects like digitizing every printed book, bringing Internet access via high-altitude balloons, and offering high-quality language translation. And sometimes it just gets bored and abandons them. Google Noto is such a […]

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Easy guide to building Mastodon bots


API keys.

Twitter is dead! Long live Mastodon! I've written lots of 'bots for Twitter - and been part of their developer outreach programme. Lots of us have politely requested improvements to the bot experience on Twitter, but to no avail. So, today I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily write your first Mastodon-bot. […]

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Virgin Media don't understand Unicode


HTML code from Virgin.

More adventures with Unicode. I logged in to my Virgin Media account to see when my promotional discount would end. Here's what their billing PDF said. Let'S Ignore The Weird Capitalisation Virgin'S System Uses. What's that  doing there? Their website says: No  symbol, but also no £ sign. Ah, but let's look at […]

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Weeknotes 3


Terence Eden standing outside Number 10 Downing Street.

Work A light-ish week - which allowed me to concentrate on my backlog. If you're getting a reply from an email you sent last year, sorry! Actually, that's not true - since switching to Google's Inbox I've found it much easier to keep on top of things. Being able to snooze mails and mark them […]

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Twitter's Secret "Guest Mode"


Twitter's guest mode displayed on a TV.

Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old […]

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Review: Meross smart plugs and surge protector


A power strip.

The good folk at Meross have sent me some of their smart-home gadgets to review. Let's dive in! Unboxing Products Smart Plug Socket And the Smart Power Strip. The single plug socket is good for 10 amps. It is smaller than the Wemo and Sonoff plugs I've reviewed. It has built in power monitoring - […]

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Digital Justice Part 2 - It Just Gets Worse


3 page CPS form - lots of little boxes to fill in.

Regular readers will know about my recent court visit. I was grumpy about the lack of connected digital services within the court. As I left court, I asked if there was anything they needed me to fill in or sign. They said there wasn't. I just sort of assumed that I wouldn't get any expenses […]

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